lifted the big knocker and rapped it firmly before he noticed that the door was ajar. A shrill scream sounded within the house, and he took it as a command to come in. He pushed the door open and saw across the kitchen another open door leading into Ann’s bedroom. She was half sitting up in bed, so that she had a clear view of the kitchen.
‘Oh, it’s you, minister! Come away in. Have you seen that lassie o’ mine?’
The minister looked round the kitchen as if the lassie might be hiding somewhere.
‘She’s awa’ oot half-an-hour syne to go to the baker’s; set her up with her gallivanting,’ said Ann, still stretching her neck towards the kitchen. ‘I’ll give her a flea in her lug – Oh, there you are, you good-for-nothing jaud!’
A sulky-looking girl bounced in past the minister, and set two loaves of bread on the dresser.
‘Dinna leave the bread there!’ screamed Ann. ‘Put it in the bread crock. And see that you put the lid on right.’
The minister advanced and sat down on a horse-hair chair beside the bed.
‘You wouldna believe it,’ went on Ann in the same high scream, ‘what I have to suffer. Folk just take a pleasure in spiting me. I canna trust that lassie to do a thing right.’
A loud rattling from the kitchen fireplace answered her.
‘What are you doing there?’ cried Ann.
The minister got up and shut the bedroom door.
‘I don’t like to see you worried, Miss Watson,’ he said. ‘Never mind the lassie. It’s you I’ve come to see.’
‘It’s all very well to say never mind the lassie,’ grumbled Ann; ‘if I didna keep an eye on her she would have everything going to rack and ruin. And she puts things where I canna bear them to be, just to spite me. And my sister Mary’s every bit as bad. You wouldna believe it, but yestreen she changed every stick o’ furniture in the kitchen, till I was nearly blue in the face. I kept that kitchen for years, and I kept father’s auld chair in its right place beside the dresser, but last night nothing wad please her but to have it out at the cheek o’ the fire for her to sit in. I tell you, I’ve made Teenie put it back beside the dresser, and there it’ll bide. We’ll see what my lady has to say till’t when she comes hame.’
‘But if Miss Mary wants to sit in it—’
‘She’ll no’ sit in it! Na, she’ll no’ sit in it! The shop’s hers, but the house is mine, and I’ll no’ put up with interference. Day in, day out, I’ve had to mind the house while she was fleein’ all over the town enjoying herself; she needna think she’s to have everything her own way here as well as outside. I may be bedridden, but I’m no’ done for yet.’
Ann nodded her head vehemently, and drew down her upper lip. She had forgotten the minister and was carrying on an inaudible quarrel with an invisible opponent. William Murray found himself looking at her as if for the first time. Her long, hard face must have been handsome once. And once she must have been a little girl playing outside on the cobbles. He felt a sudden sympathy for her; it was touching to see a human soul journeying from one infinity to another in such a narrow cage.
She was still nodding her head, but her lips had ceased to move. So he addressed her again:
‘How did you come to stay at home while Miss Mary took over the shop?’
Ann, without knowing it, might have been affected by the sympathy in his voice; at any rate she now answered him simply and directly:
‘Because I aye had to keep the house, you see. Mother was like me, helpless wi’ rheumatism for years an’ years, and I was the handiest in the house. She couldna bear to see Mary flinging the things aboot, so I bude to bide, and Mary gaed to help father in the shop. And she just stayed on there. I never got a chance to do anything else. I’ve just been buried alive here – buried alive.’
Her high voice quavered.
‘I dare say,’ said the minister, ‘you didn’t feel like that while your father was at home? He must have liked you to keep house for him?’
‘I aye got on fine wi’ father,’ said Ann. ‘I aye got on fine wi’ father…. But Mary wadna let me in the shop. An’ I’ll no’ let her in father’s chair. Na, I’ll no’.’
‘And yet,’ said the minister, ‘she and you are all that’s left on this earth of your father.’ He put his hand on hers. ‘You were bairns together,’ he said.
Ann’s mouth opened in amazement. But what she was going to say remained unspoken as her eye met the minister’s.
‘We’re all bairns together,’ he went on: ‘bairns frightened to believe in the love that’s behind everything, the love of our Heavenly Father. There’s a lot of love in you, Miss Ann, that has never had a chance.’
The Reverend William Murray walked down the lane much more briskly than he had come. Ann had suffered him to read ‘a chapter’, and had even asked him to put up ‘a bit prayer’. Instinctively his eye sought the pale sky, now veiled with insubstantial clouds through which the light of the declining sun was softly diffused. The firmament, he said to himself, with a new realization of the word. A firm basis. An enduring reality. It did not even enter his mind that there were people in the world who might regard his firmament as a mere illusion of beauty woven of light and air. The Reverend William Murray did not doubt the universal validity of his personal experiences.
THREE
I
Mr and Mrs John Shand, as was fitting, gave a dinner in the evening to welcome the bride and bridegroom, a family function, the only other guest being Miss Janet Shand.
The dinner itself was a success. Mabel had studied even more intensively than usual her stock of ladies’ magazines, and the table decorations, the glass, the silver, the modish little mats recommended instead of an enveloping tablecloth by Lady Fanny of The Ladies’ Fashionmonger, had all attained the high standard set by that arbiter of refinement. And had knocked Elizabeth flat, decided Mabel.
Such a satisfactory conclusion ought to have made her happy. But a hostess, a figure who carries the main burden of civilization, whose difficult task it is to invent a progressive notation for mankind’s faith in the ability of the human spirit to surpass itself, cannot ignore the more rarefied ingredients of a dinner-party, the blending of temperaments, the flavour of conversation, the pleasant aroma of expanding minds. A dinner-party that provokes quarrels is like a bouquet containing nettles, and it was undeniable that all three of them now remaining by the fireside, Mabel, John and Aunt Janet, were nettled.
John was standing with his back to the fire. He was a tall, bulky man with reddish fair hair; his features were large but harmonious, and the beard he wore dignified his appearance. In spite of the beard, however, there was something simple and childlike in his face; perhaps it was the candid expression of his blue eyes which had no eyebrows to give them depth.
‘She’s much too good for him,’ he said.
Aunt Janet laid down her knitting again. It was a custom that she should spend the night with John and Mabel after dining there.
‘You
